An introductory lecture read at the opening of the clinique for nervous and mental diseases in the Royal Charité in Berlin, 1st May, 1866 / by Professor W. Griesinger ; translated by John Sibbald.
- Griesinger, Wilhelm, 1817-1868.
- Date:
- 1867
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: An introductory lecture read at the opening of the clinique for nervous and mental diseases in the Royal Charité in Berlin, 1st May, 1866 / by Professor W. Griesinger ; translated by John Sibbald. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.
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![The power of observation in the alienist is at least sharpened by exercise as regards those persons who show their insanity more by deeds than words, deeds whose import as signs of mental aberration is incomprehensible to the non-professional public; and consequently, he does not confound origiuahty and gemus with monomania, ior this diagnosis he has only one, but that an mfaUible, test:—By their fruits he recognises both. i , i i i,- j But when, from the neuropathic point of view, he looks behind the pathological coulisses he will meet with surprising results indeed. One of the parents or grandparents of one of these singular individuals was insane, epileptic, and deeply hypochondriacal, and died of diabetes; one of his brothers or sisters suffered from vertigo, another from chronic headache, &c.; the individual himself has already had attacks of convulsions or of vertigo, perhaps only a single one, but one epileptic seizure is enough to entirely change the nature of a person; the man may become eccentric, or the woman nervous. And if only one of the brothers or sisters has so suffered the family constitutes thus far to a certahi degree a patholo- gical unity, an attack of convulsions or a severe neuralgia so often vibrates through many of its members. So much, gentlemen, I wished to remark at present on the conception of the predisposition to mental disease from the neu- ropathic point of view. It would be just as easy for me to rei)re- sent the inseparable and intimate connection of the symptoms of the so-called mental diseases with other nervous diseases, and thus to illustrate further the correctness of the neuropathic view. In the brain diseases which we call mental diseases anomalous phenomena of movement and of sensation play an important part, and the latter class especially constitutes sometimes the whole foundation and cause of the mental disturbance, so that such dis- turbance does not appear or ceases to appear, according as the anomalies of sensation are absent or are arrested. I do not speak here of hallucinations, which are something more than pure sensations, as we shall see further on. I would rather speak to-day of certain forms of mental disease which are so directly connected with anoma- lies of sensation of an ordinary kind; the whole malady is, at its commencement, only an abnormal sensation, and exhibits no real aberration in the sphere of the emotions, nor, indeed, of the in- telligence, and which show us so completely the intimate con- nection of anomalous conditions of the mind with other nervous diseases. You know what part the aura plays in e])ilepsy. In a great number of cases it ushers in the attack, which explodes in con- vulsions ; and we have good reason to believe that, though it can be truly peripheral, it may also be entirely central in its origin. Now, there are cases of permanent non-explosive aura, which are nothing](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21461089_0011.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
